Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno: Which API Client Should Your Team Use in 2025

Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno: Which API Client Should Your Team Use in 2025

Three tools dominate the conversation whenever engineering teams talk about API clients. Postman, the long-time market leader, reported over 35 million registered users by 2024. Insomnia, acquired by Kong in 2019, carved out a niche among developers who wanted something leaner. And Bruno, launched in 2022, arrived with a pitch that resonated immediately: your API collections live as plain files on your own machine, not in someone else’s cloud.

The choice matters more than it used to. API clients are no longer just request builders — they’re collaboration surfaces, testing harnesses, and in some workflows, documentation generators. Picking the wrong one means either paying for features nobody uses or fighting tooling that doesn’t fit how your team works. Here’s how the three compare in 2025.

Postman: The Everything Platform

Postman’s strength is breadth. It handles REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, and SOAP requests. It offers mock servers, automated test suites, CI/CD integrations through the Newman CLI, API documentation hosting, and a monitoring service that pings your endpoints on a schedule. If your organization wants one tool that covers the entire API lifecycle, Postman is the only one of the three that genuinely attempts it.

The trade-offs are well documented. Postman’s cloud-first model means collections sync to Postman’s servers by default, which raises questions for teams in regulated industries or anyone uncomfortable with proprietary data formats. The company has added features like the VS Code extension and a lightweight API client, but the core experience still pushes users toward workspaces, accounts, and increasingly, paid tiers.

Pricing is the friction point most teams hit. The free tier covers basic use, but collaboration features — shared workspaces with role-based access, for instance — require paid plans. As of 2025, the Basic plan runs about $14 per user per month, and Professional sits around $29. For a 20-person team, that’s real budget. Postman also changed its pricing structure in 2023 in ways that frustrated some long-time users, a reminder that cloud-hosted tooling comes with vendor risk.

Best for: Large organizations that want API testing, documentation, mocking, and monitoring under one roof, and are comfortable with cloud sync and per-seat costs.

Insomnia: The Developer’s Power Tool

Insomnia has always positioned itself as the tool for people who write code, not the ones managing API programs. Its interface is cleaner than Postman’s, its startup time is faster, and its plugin ecosystem lets you extend request handling with JavaScript. GraphQL support is particularly strong, with schema introspection and query autocompletion that many developers prefer over Postman’s implementation.

The Kong acquisition brought stability and enterprise features — SSO, RBAC, audit logs — but it also shifted the product’s center of gravity. Insomnia’s free tier still exists, but the useful team features sit behind a paywall. In 2023, Kong moved Insomnia’s storage from local files to a cloud-first model, which triggered significant pushback from users who had chosen the tool partly because it kept data local. The company partially walked this back, but the episode damaged trust for some.

Insomnia’s pricing under Kong starts around $12 per user per month for the Individual plan and scales up for teams. It’s cheaper than Postman at the entry level, but the feature gap between free and paid is noticeable.

Best for: Individual developers and small teams who want a fast, focused client with strong GraphQL support and don’t mind a cloud dependency.

Bruno: The Git-Native Challenger

Bruno’s core idea is simple and, for many teams, immediately appealing: collections are stored as plain-text .bru files in a folder on your filesystem. You version them with Git. You review changes in pull requests. You share them the same way you share code. No account required, no cloud sync, no proprietary format.

That architecture solves a problem that has quietly annoyed developers for years. With Postman or Insomnia, collection changes live in a proprietary cloud, which means they don’t fit naturally into code review workflows. Bruno treats API collections as code, and for teams already living in Git, that’s a meaningful shift.

Bruno is also fully offline and open source (MIT licensed), with a paid “Golden Edition” that adds features like team collaboration tooling and support. It supports REST and GraphQL, includes a scripting layer, and runs on a desktop app built with Electron. The project has grown quickly — by 2024 it had crossed 20,000 GitHub stars — though it remains smaller and less feature-complete than its competitors. gRPC support and advanced testing features are still catching up.

Best for: Teams that want version-controlled, offline-first collections, value open source, and are willing to trade some polish for control over their data.

How to Choose

The decision usually comes down to three questions.

Where should your collections live? If your organization requires data residency controls or you simply want your API definitions in the same repo as your code, Bruno is the only one of the three built around that assumption. Postman and Insomnia both assume cloud storage by default.

What’s your budget tolerance? Postman and Insomnia both charge per seat for collaboration. For a team of 10, that’s roughly $1,700 to $3,500 per year depending on tier. Bruno’s core tool is free, and its paid tier is priced lower. If cost is a factor and you don’t need Postman’s monitoring or documentation hosting, the math favors Bruno.

How much of the API lifecycle do you need? If you want mock servers, scheduled monitoring, and hosted documentation in one product, Postman is the only real option here. If you just need to send requests, manage environments, and run tests, all three do the job.

A practical pattern that’s emerged in 2025: teams use Bruno or Insomnia for day-to-day development and keep Postman around for the specific features — monitoring, public documentation — that the others don’t replicate. There’s no rule that says you have to pick one.

The Bottom Line

Postman remains the safest choice for enterprises that want an all-in-one platform and can absorb the per-seat cost. Insomnia suits developers who prioritize speed and GraphQL tooling and are comfortable with Kong’s cloud model. Bruno is the right answer for teams that treat API collections as code and want them versioned alongside it — and its open-source, offline-first approach is the clearest differentiator any of these tools has offered in years.

The honest answer: try Bruno for a week. It takes about ten minutes to migrate a Postman collection, and the Git workflow either clicks for your team or it doesn’t. That experiment will tell you more than any feature comparison can.